Your headline sucks?

Headlines worth 90% of the money invested in advertising — Ogilvy

It is a public secret that by default people couldn’t care less about your website or article. They only care about how it is going to solve their problems, make them smarter or simply entertain them for a few minutes.

Think about the stories you read in Medium, you never click in the boring looking headings that don’t awake any feeling. Your story can be amazing, but with that boring headline you are losing a lot of potential readers.

Users make the decision to stay in a website or click a link in seconds and the headline is the first thing they are going to read. The best way to make them stay is by generating some sort of emotion in the reader because decisions are emotional, not logical. This is what researchers say, so trust them.

Don’t get me wrong, content is still the king! Meeting the expectations generated in the heading with great content is vital. The objective of a headline is simply to make the user read the next sentence or click through.

For instance, if you are a marketer for a mobile app you shouldn’t focus on features. Focus on the emotions your target users are experiencing or want to experience. You want to show them that there is a before and after, that their life will change to better.

The more you know your target audience’s problems, the easier it will be. (Basic marketing stuff).

Your customers care about the progress they will make as a result of using your product. — Chris Brophy

Think about, how is your app making user’s life better? Saving their money and time? How do they feel about it? What can they do with that extra money and time?

Slack’s website headline was “be less busy” in 2014, which is something anyone working in a company would like to achieve. If somebody is telling you that can make you less busy you would probably want to listen more and learn how.

However, if they are telling you that they are a team chat that improves your team communication, I don’t think most of us would feel excited or would like to hear more.

Now, they have changed it to “where work happens”, which actually brings their new approach of getting things done in different platforms without leaving Slack. Now the communication problem is pretty much solved, so they are focusing on “get things done”, which I think is very smart move.

So don’t underestimate the importance of headlines and focus on how your target user’s life will be better if they use your product. This way, they definitely would like to hear more.

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